How to Clear Your Lightroom Catalogue And Free Up SpacePhotos take up a lot of storage space and there is nothing much we can do about that. Lightroom also takes up a lot of space, gobbling up hard drives as you import photos. In this tutorial we show you how to reduce the storage Lightroom Catalogue uses and free up some much needed disk space.
Many modern laptops come with SSD storage, which is much faster than traditional hard drives; they are also more expensive. To keep costs down, laptops generally come with smaller-capacity SSDs. Couple this with the increasing storage needs of Windows and other popular applications, and you may run out of space.
You can move your Lightroom catalogue if you have an external USB drive. However, this will be at the cost of performance. If you use network-attached storage (NAS) like me, then you are totally out of luck, as Lightroom doesn't even allow this.
There are some things we can do along our Lightroom workflow which will help prevent the catalogue from growing as fast, and there are a few things we can do to shrink an already large Lightroom catalogue to save space.
Lightroom Folder Locations
Here are the most popular locations for Lightroom files so you know where to look if you need to locate any files. The Lightroom cache is located within the catalogue itself.
The boot drive is set to C: and Macintosh HD on Windows and Mac. <username>, is the name of your user account; for instance, mine is tim.
Default Lightroom Catalogue Location
On Windows the catalogue is found in C:\Users\<username>\My Pictures\Lightroom\Lightroom Catalog.lrcat
On MacOS the catalogue can be found in
Default Lightroom Preset and Templates Location
On Windows, you can find presets, templates and brushes in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\
On MacOS they can be found in Macintosh HD/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/
Shrink Lightroom Catalogue
Let's first look at ways to shrink your Lightroom catalogue and free up drive space.
Remove Old Backups
First, you need to locate your Lightroom folder. Open the Catalogue Settings, which can be found within the Edit menu.
Click on the General tab, then find the entry for location. This should show a file path, with a button labelled Show on the right.
Clicking this displays a system file window with your catalogue folder selected. Open the folder.
You should see a folder named "Backups" within the Lightroom catalogue folder. If your situation is anything like mine, it'll have backups back to when you first installed Lightroom. Delete the ones which you don't need anymore. I'd recommend keeping the most recent few, but anything older takes up space.
Clearing Down Previews
Each time you import photos into Lightroom, it automatically generates previews for each photo. These previews can take up large space, especially if you have many photos. If you have photos you don't look at or work with, it could be a good idea to clear down the previews folder to free up some space. When you open or view the photo again, Lightroom will automatically regenerate previews, which are not important to keep. The only downside to clearing them down is that Lightroom will be slower whilst browsing the catalogue as it regenerates the previews.
To delete the Lightroom previews, delete the Lightroom Catalogue Previews.lrdata file. Your filename may differ depending on how you named your catalogue, but it will end up in Previews.lrdata.
Clearing the Lightroom Cache
One final area to clear down some unnecessary data and free up hard drive space is the Lightroom Cache. Like the previews, these are generated by Lightroom when you import and work with photos. There are a few types of cache that Lightroom uses, but the important ones are "Camera Raw" and "Video". Camera Raw stores a preview of any RAW files you may work on and is kept up to date with the modifications you make. The cache file is translated from a RAW file and then has the developed settings applied to it. If you work with RAW files and don't work on them again after exporting, this cache could become large. Video cache is similar, except that it works on video files and can get quite large.
You can view the cache settings, clear them, or even deactivate them if you decide to. Click on the Edit menu, Preferences, and File Handling tab.
From here, you can set the maximum size of the cache, change its location, and clear its contents.
How to Keep Lightroom Catalogue Small
The Lightroom Catalogue will grow as long as you keep importing photos, and your available drive space will reduce as it grows. There isn't much you can do, save for buying a new drive. However, you can do several things to reduce the rate at which the catalogue grows, and it should form part of your Lightroom workflow.
First, each time you import photos from your camera, go through each one and Pick (approve) or Reject it using the keyboard keys P to pick and X to reject. Once complete, you can then delete the rejected photos. These could be out of focus, poor exposure, blurred or other rejected photos. You don't need them hanging around taking up space on the hard drive and in the Lightroom catalogue.
If you have a large catalogue and haven't deleted photos, it could be a good idea to go through this process. I used to have a "never delete anything" mentality, but when I went through my catalogue of nearly 170,000 photos, I ended up deleting almost 60,000 of them due to just being under or over-exposed, burned out, out of focus, lens cap on, too blurry etc. That alone saved me 40GB!
The next thing to look at is duplicates. A duplicate photo can get into your collection in many ways, from twice importing, not clearing the SD card after import, and manual import folders. The best way to check is to use a duplicate file finder to scan the hard drive. You need to be careful that any duplicates are removed not to have adjustments made, and this can be a time-consuming process.
